Wheat-dogg's World

Paleontology

Evolutionary theory depends heavily on the fossil record, so one would expect the Guide’s treatment of paleontology would be the most extensive of the three areas of scientific research listed in the introduction. It’s not.

The Guide repeats the same criticisms of fossils that many creationist and ID proponents have had for decades. There’s nothing new here. Their case is weak.

Guide:
Somehow “in the face of these ‘impossible’ odds, the first cell could have formed, and over time developed into all” the organisms now existent. Previous organisms would have left a “substantial” record of evolution among the millions of fossils uncovered after 130+ years of searching. In Darwin’s words,

“The number of intermediate and transitional links between all living and extinct species must have been inconceivably great.”

In fact, the fossil record as a whole, contrary to conventional wisdom, actually gives persuasive evidence against Darwinian evolution, as we shall see.

Comments:
More than likely, given the size of the “lab” on ancient Earth, there was more than one cell. Bacteria and other one-celled organisms replicate very quickly, so in short order the Earth was probably teeming with life. Genetics supports the hypothesis of common descent from a single organism, since all organisms have variations of the same central molecule, DNA. The commonality of DNA begs the question of a Designer creating each organism separately. Why not create each organism with a different genetic “programming” molecule?

Setting that issue aside, there is actually substantial support for evolution among the fossil record, and new fossil finds have only reinforced that support. None have favored the ID concept.

The snippet from The Origin of Species is a tad misleading, since Darwin was not referring to transitional fossils, but to genetic links between ancient and more modern species.

By the theory of natural selection all living species have been connected with the parent-species of each genus, by differences not greater than we see between the natural and domestic varieties of the same species at the present day; and these parent-species, now generally extinct, have in their turn been similarly connected with more ancient forms; and so on backwards, always converging to the common ancestor of each great class. So that the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory be true, such have lived upon the earth.

Guide:
“Top scientists agree about the weak evidence for Darwinianism in the fossil record,” the Guide says. It then quotes at length Dr. Michael Denton, a senior research fellow at the University of Otago, New Zealand, who notes

“there are huge gaps between species, and further, The gaps which separate species: dog/fox, rat/mouse, etc. are utterly trivial compared with, say, that between a primitive terrestrial mammal and a whale, or a primitive terrestrial reptile and an ichthyosaur; and even these relatively major discontinuities are trivial alongside those which divide major phyla such as mollusks and arthropods. Surely such transitions must have involved long lineages including many collateral lines of hundreds or perhaps thousands of transitional species.

“To suggest that the hundreds, thousands, or possibly millions of “transitional” species which must have existed in the interval between vastly dissimilar types were all unsuccessful species occupying isolated areas and having very small population numbers [i.e., we just haven’t found them yet] is verging on the incredible!”

Comments:
The allegation that “top scientists agree about the weak evidence” for evolution (note the term, Darwinianism, here, subtly sounding like Marxism or Stalinism or Nazism) is untrue. The only top scientists mentioned on this page are both presently or formerly associated with the ID movement and specifically the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash. Denton, a biochemist, wrote Evolution: A Theory in Crisis in 1985, from which this quote comes. He has since left the ID movement, but still criticizes evolutionary theory as being incomplete and inconsistent. Denton now seems not to deny common descent or evolution in general. In his latest book, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (1998), Denton argues that the universe has been specially designed to harbor life. As this quote shows, he also seems to accept genetic evidence of common descent, despite prior misgivings:

One of the most surprising discoveries which has arisen from DNA sequencing has been the remarkable finding that the genomes of all organisms are clustered very close together in a tiny region of DNA sequence space forming a tree of related sequences that can all be interconverted via a series of tiny incremental natural steps. So the sharp discontinuities … between different organs and adaptations and different types of organisms, which have been the bedrock of antievolutionary arguments for the past century, have now greatly been diminished at the DNA level.

He also has this to say regarding evolution:

“I am sure that the cause of evolution will turn out to be perfectly natural even though as yet we have no satisfactory naturalistic explanation. However I am inclined to the view that when the natural explanations are elucidated they will represent deeply embedded laws or tendencies in the nature of things which will largely restrict life forms to designs similar to those actually manifest on earth or in other words that life’s design is not contingent as [biologist Stephen Jay] Gould claims but directed in large measure by physics in the most general sense of the term.”

So this “top scientist” seems to reject the idea of “weak evidence” for evolution, AND the notion of intelligent design. (He may also have moved on from Otago, as he is no longer listed in the University’s staff directories.) Notice the Guide fails to mention these details.

Guide:
Now the Guide comments on the Cambrian Explosion, the sudden flourishing of millions of new species in the Cambrian era, during a relatively short span of geologic time. It then quotes Dr. Stephen Meyer, co-founder of the ID thinktank, the Discovery Institute:

“to produce each new organism during the Cambrian Explosion ‘you needed a whole bunch of new cell types, and then you needed new proteins to service the different unique cell types; and to build the proteins you needed genetic information in the form of DNA.’

If information comes from an intelligent source, the best scientific answer would appear to be intelligent design.”

Then we have this quote, presumably from Meyer but unattributed:

“The big question that the Cambrian Explosion poses is where does all that new information come from? Where does the new information come from needed to build those proteins, to service those new cell types, to build these fundamentally new forms of animals?”

Comments:
The Cambrian Explosion is the term for the “sudden” flourishing of life beginning 580 million years ago. Before that time, most organisms were single-celled, either surviving as individuals or in colonies (like coral). Within a relatively short time of 70 to 80 million years, there was an “explosion” of multicellular organisms, mostly inverterbrates like the trilobites. Explanations for the sudden diversification of organisms range from environmental changes to predator/prey to the more prosaic possibility that earlier fossils of multicellular are somehow no longer extant. One possibility is the increase in oxygen dissolved in the oceans’ water, respiration of which would have provided larger animals the energy to procreate.

Meyer’s complaint that there would not be enough time to create so much genetic information is ill-informed. The Earth before and during the Cambrian Era was a hot bed of life, and some multicelled organisms may have actually developed well before the Cambrian. Given the likely diversity of organism and their presence throughout the world’s oceans, there would be plenty of genetic information available. Fossils from these early times are scarce, so we lack valuable evidence of pre-Cambrian life, but we can assume some multicelled organisms did develop.

Note that this other “top scientist” is a co-founder of a principal ID organization. Doubtless he would oppose common descent and evolution.

Guide:
The rest of this section summarizes its two main points, and the “evidence” from cosmology, molecular biology and paleontology pointing to ID. The conclusion is that the best answer to all the questions raised by the Guide is “an intelligent cause outside time and space,” producing new genetic information for a purposeful design of life.

Comments:
Well, that intelligent cause sounds awfully like God, so why not ‘fess up and say it? We’re really talking about divine creation here, though not in the literal sense as described in Genesis. All the assertions, appeals to authority, edited, misleading quotations, and gaps in theoretical explanations are not evidence for ID, and there is certainly no new scientific research presented here, as the introduction promises. It’s all interpretation of existing evidence, and only convincing to those already disposed to accept supernatural causes.

For an excellent survey of paleontology, the University of California Museum of Paleontology at Berkeley maintains a detailed, easy to understand “virtual museum.”

Next up: The Guide changes direction